Monday, February 17, 2014

In the builds of Chalo Chalo that exist so far, the race maps look something like this.

The landscape is punctuated by differently coloured squares that function as contrasting terrain types. Populating the map with squares (well, flattened cubes really) has been a great way to get something interesting up and running quickly; They're easy to create at run time, and this approach allows us to use Richard's cunning routines to nudge their randomly chosen position to make for more interesting races.

What bothers me about the squares isn't their simple geometry, I like that, it's the way they overlap. The terrain patches resemble post-it notes stuck over one another. This suggestion of layers isn't a good fit with the idea of a unified racing plane we've had in mind.

Not knowing whether it will all work out yet or not, here's the plan for how I want to change things. We'll generate and position squares as before. But then we'll do a couple of extra things. We'll generate a Voronoi diagram over the top of the squares. For each cell in the diagram we'll do a raycast downwards from its center and see what squares we hit. The cell will take on the terrain type found most often in the squares directly beneath it. So in a sense the Voronoi diagram will quantize the terrain data from the underlying squares, but it will be mapping it to irregular polygons.

I'm keen on this approach because it will let us keep using stark geometry, while introducing a more organic element, and the tesselation will visually flatten the playing field--consistent with the idea of a single racing plane.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Thursday, February 6, 2014

No Wheelcolliders here. Unlike in the early builds I am using Unity's built-in physics here. As before the terrain types are detected with raycasts. The player is locked to a single plane using position and rotation constraints. The damping of the player's rigidbody, and an input force modifier, are adjusted in response to the terrain type. Here the dot is struggling on ice.

Chalo Chalo is a racing game that doesn't focus on speed, but on tactical choices and outsmarting your friends. You compete locally with three to eight players at the same time on the same screen.

A unique landscape is generated for each race. During the countdown you make a plan, taking into account the terrain, your opponents and the power pickups.

With a special power, or just a simple nudge, you can send an opponent off track, sometimes with fatal consequences. But when the others are closing in, be sure you can pull it off without harming your own position.

Tomasz is best known for creating the anarchistic propaganda cartoon George Ought to Help
and its sequels. He also makes electronic music under the Mormo alias and created sound
effects for Sparpweed's game ibb & obb.